My Sunday Series on Outdoor Portraits collides with my ongoing theme of Available Light Portraiture, today featuring a photograph of my wife Mary. Let’s not forget that it is also Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day honoring the 3,500 Americans who lost their lives on December 7, 1941.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
How I made this portrait: The Carl Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 Planar T* lens, with its bright viewfinder image, makes manual focusing a snap when doing night photography like the above portrait of my wife, Mary. The lens produces beautiful images even when shot wide open and working under less than ideal lighting conditions, such as shooting outdoors under Christmas lights. The exposure with my EOS 5D Mark I, was 1/30 sec at f1/4 and ISO 800 with a plus me and two-thirds stop exposure compensation. Making portraits under these kind of lighting conditions with a full frame DSLR using only the illumination from holiday lights was surprisingly easy.
The Right Lens at the Right Time
The Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 Planar T* that’s available for Canon EOS DSLRs is designed to be used at medium and longer distances— close focusing is at 1.48-feet—and produces high-performance image captures even when shot wide open and improves as the lens is stopped down.
Please note this is not a sponsored post, just my experience with the lens.
The lens has been designed to control flare and ghosting artifacts, producing a brilliant viewfinder image with excellent contrast and natural color rendition. Hey, it’s Zeiss dont’cha know. A T* anti-reflective coating was applied to individual elements to control lens flare and ghosting for improved contrast and color accuracy.
This lens is compact measuring 2.8 x 1.89-Inches and has a 58mm filter thread. It has a precise manual focusing mechanism that has the same kind of large rotation angle that I found in the Zeiss Planar T* 85mm f/1.4 ZE lens I tested but here this lens feels more natural with less focusing action required. This will be a big plus for those readers who grew up using autofocus cameras and have never focused a manual focus lens before. Don’t be shy; It’s not only easy but gets you emotionally closer to the subject by making the process more interactive.
The big challenge for me when photographing Mary was making sure to hold the camera steady enough—there is no IBIS—to be able pull the maximum sharpness that this lens can produce. At the same time, there was some c cold weather testing of the 50mm f/1.4 Planar T* going on during this shoot when the temperature was in the mid-teens (F) in Colorado. The lens performed flawlessly.
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If you’re interested in learning how I shoot available light glamour portraits, please pick up a copy of Available Light Glamour Photography that’s available from Amazon with used copies priced starting at forty-eight dollars. Kindle copies are just $27.88.